Is it deceptive to attempt to rank for a city you're located just outside of?

[engeniusbrent]

I live in Greenville, SC (who has a large "Greater Greenville" reach). I work for an agency with many clients who are located just outside of the city in smaller towns, sometimes technically in counties other than Greenville. Often, they provide services in the city of Greenville and aim to grow business there, so we'll use "Greenville, SC" throughout site copy, in titles, and in meta descriptions.

Are there any negative implications to this? Any chance search engines think these clients are being deceptive? And is it possible these clients are hurting their ranking in their actual location by trying to appear to be a Greenville-based company?

Thank you for any thoughts!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Brent,

Great topic! So, fundamentally, yes, the business isn't being honest in representing itself to the consumer public as being in a city where it isn't actually located. So, from an ethical standpoint, this is problematic.

From a search standpoint, Google is going to rely on the physical address of the business. If the company's website and citations state that it's at 123 Anderson Road in White Horse, SC, no amount of optimizing for Greenville is going to fool Google into thinking that the business is physically located there. Because of this, the company cannot expect to rank in Google's local packs for Greenville-related-or-based searches, unless there is almost no competition in this company's geo-industry (like they are the only gas station servicing a 25 mile radius).

I know - it's a drag that a business just outside of city borders is typically out of the running for local pack rankings, but Google's bias towards physical location is very strong. Where does this leave a client like yours? It depends on the exact nature of its business model. Some questions:

1. Do your clients' customers come to the physical location of the business, or is it a service area business (SAB), like a plumber, that services customers in a variety of towns?

2. Does the company also have customers in the town where it's physically located, or is it only getting customers from Greenville or other cities?

Please, let the community know what you can. If you're not able to share the identity of the client, that's okay, but the more specific you can be, the more customized feedback you'll receive here.

[brettmandoes]

Just to piggyback off of Miriam, we do a lot for clients in the home services category who want to show up in markets like this. Our clients are service area businesses, so we build targeted pages that talk about the service they provide for that market. What we have found is that by making that page unique to the market has helped us with gaining some of that sweet page one visibility.

You will almost never rank higher in a market outside of your physical location, but yes, it's possible to get some visibility. Just make sure you're being honest in your representation to customers. An SEO strategy that ends with an angry, non-paying customer is not a strategy at all.